My Feedburner Concerns
November 20, 2008 – 10:31 am | by Daryl TayBefore you read this post, you might want to know a little bit more about subscribing and rss so that you can keep things in context! Got it? Great.
Feedburner is a tool that many bloggers (including myself) use to:
a) Provide blog readers with an rss feed of their posts
b) Track their rss subscription statistics (ie: how many people are subscribed to their blog)
Without a doubt it’s a decent tool, but here’s the problem: it’s not terribly reliable. Just check out a screenshot of my supposed subscription stats over the last couple of weeks:
Feedburner Stats
These stats lead me to believe one of two things:
1) I have extremely fickle blog readers and lost 10% of them one day and gain back 15% the next day (not to mention on some days all of them stop subscribing and then the number jumps back up the next day)
2) The numbers aren’t accurate
Neither a terribly good conclusion to draw, and I’m even more incredulous at this because Feedburner has been owned by Google since 2007. Given the great stats provided by Google Analytics, why has nothing been done to increase accuracy with Feedburner after almost 18 months?
But besides the fact that inaccuracy bugs me (and many people on Twitter), there is a bigger issue. Remember point a? That Feedburner actually provides the link for readers to subscribe? That’s what scares me. Should Google decide tomorrow that Feedburner isn’t worth what they paid for it and shut it down or leave it to die, means that all our blog readers will be pointed to a metaphorical dead end. And given the lack of innovation and current state of affairs, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if that were to happen eventually.
I know when I switched rss feeds from the old blog to this I lost a lot of readers and traffic, but that was my choice. I would certainly hate for it to happen because of poor maintenance or a poor business decision in 2007. Do you worry about this? Does it bug you that your stats aren’t accurate? Be heard!
Tags: bloggers, feedburner, feedburner reliability, Google, migrating rss feeds, rss feeds, rss statistics
6 Responses to “My Feedburner Concerns”
By scrufus on Nov 20, 2008 | Reply
I also wondered before why the stats are jumping up and down a lot so I did a bit of poking. There are a lot of RSS readers around and their frequency of refreshing feeds differ. eg. Google Reader seems to poll it on the fly so it only accesses the feeds when a user opens his/her account. Ultimately, it affects the stats that feedburner generates. The daily number that feedburner shows is the number of times the feed was accessed for that particular day. Since it’s not everyday that everyone who’s subscribed to you will access their feed, there will always be spikes in what feedburner is reporting. I think it even gives you more insight as to when most of your readers access their rss subscriptions.
By Jonathan Wong on Nov 20, 2008 | Reply
Web analytics are generally easy to track, since when someone loads a web page, it generally means that they are reading it then and there on the spot.
For RSS feeds, it’s not as straightforward, since I believe many newsreaders pull the feed once for many users, cache feeds, and use all sorts of optimization tricks that may skew the FeedBurner stats. Not to mention if I don’t load a feed today, it doesn’t mean that the site lost me as a subscriber - it just means that I’m not reading news today. So my guess is FeedBurner also uses some sort of decaying metrics or cookies or something to make it appear that you still hold the subscriber, although they may not have loaded your feed in days.
A more accurate way to measure RSS popularity will be via services like Toluu (www.toluu.com) or even Google Reader’s own statistics. Unfortunately, not enough people use these services, thus again rendering the metric faulty.
Your point about FeedBurner suddenly going away is a valid point. However, that is one of the tradeoffs that we constantly have to make when we are using services in the cloud. We constantly have to make the decision on whether to take the leap or not, based on our assessment of how reliable the service provider is.
Google, just like Microsoft, Yahoo, and the other big players are reliable enough for me to sleep easy at night.
I mean, no one is worried that our Gmail and Hotmail accounts suddenly disappear overnight, do we?
By JoshMiller on Nov 21, 2008 | Reply
On the other hand, if you ever change blog designs, templates, engines (wordpress to Typepad etc), you can feed the new RSS URL into feedburner and everyone stays subscribed.
Though fears of Google closing Feedburner are grounded in some reality, the truth is, Google likely gets a TON of statistical data (Google’s primary care) from these subscriptions and it’s very very unlikely to be closed.
On the other hand, I’m starting to question my investment in storing photos on Flickr with Yahoo!’s current situation, soooo, maybe these concerns aren’t so crazy.
By Daryl Tay on Nov 21, 2008 | Reply
@scrufus & Jonathan: Thanks for the information on how rss feeds are collated differently. It sounds weird to me that they would not have come up with a better way to do it by now. Although I have to say I am not entirely convinced by the arguments because if the number FeedBurner is showing me is the number of people who accessed my feeds, it doesn’t seem very likely. Wouldn’t it make more sense to show the total number of people subscribed, and then a subset of people who actually access them?
And yeah Gmail would never go down, but we just saw Lively get killed didn’t we! That’s what can happen to the smaller Google projects.
@JoshMiller: Yes that’s the thing about trusting the “cloud”. I agree the likelihood of FeedBurner itself shutting down is remote, but a more likely scenario is a competing service comes out with something that actually measures it accurately and we want to switch, but then are stuck in a terrible dilemma of switching to a reliable service but losing subscribers, or sticking to an inaccurate one.
By scrufus on Nov 21, 2008 | Reply
Yes, it would make more sense. Most people, including I, would actually want that.
But as of the moment it’s not technically possible since there’s no way any service would know if you are subscribed or unsubscribed at any given moment. The only thing that can be tracked is if your feed was accessed or not. Feeds are basically just bookmarked URLs. There’s still no software that can accurately track how many have bookmarked a site. It’s not like mailing lists where there is an actual list saying who’s subscribed or not.
Among Google’s “projects”, Gmail, along with Calendar and Docs, is less likely to get shutdown because it is the testbed for features on one of their revenue streams — Google Apps for domains. And they use them internally so it makes sense to continually develop them.
By JoshMiller on Nov 22, 2008 | Reply
For what it’ worth, if there was a better service out there you could probably stick your Feedburner RSS feed into it and keep both.
Though there might be some funny math involved to figure out how many people are suing the new service + people suing just feed burner.